Knowledge Sharing Behaviours 2.0

I’m currently working with the Henley KM Forum on a project which is exploring how the rise of social media have changed knowledge-sharing competencies and behaviours – and how we can help people to understand and embrace this

We’ve set up a LinkedIn Group entitled Knowledge Sharing 2.0 to engage a wider group in the discussion – please sign up and join in!

Meanwhile, to give you a flavour, here are a couple of posts from yesterday:

3 comments

Chris Collison • Hi Susan,
I think there are several dimensions of knowledge sharing where social media have significantly accelerated, amplified, or positively skewed good old-fashioned KM. [You know – the kind of knowledge-sharing activities that we’ll tell our kids about one day, and they’ll laugh at us… just like they can’t believe that we once used land-line telephones with wires connected to the receiver]

Here are five areas/behaviours which I can think of for starters…

Immediacy: – Presence, IM and microblogging have all changed expectations in terms of how quickly people respond and react. Most transactions happen within minutes or hours. I almost hesitate to respond to things what are a few days old now… That never used to happen.

Imperfect incompleteness: – This is related to the immediacy point above. People don’t wait until they have the ideal solution before they share now – you get raw, partly formed ideas, suggestions, contacts, 140 characters. Responding is now less pressurised – it’s no longer about competition, it’s about contribution. That has to be a good thing in not-invented-here cultures. There’s less pressure to reject something which is delightfully imperfect.

Serendipity: – Twitter and its equivalent now connect me with people and content that I would have never have stumbled across. It’s like those Brownian motion experiments we did in chemistry – increase the intensity of temperature or pressure, and the chances of a collision increases.

Connectivity: – It’s just so easy now to get plugged into everything. Barriers to entry are minimal. And the connections you don’t know about, you get alerted to.

Transparency: – I’ve had to get used to doing more of my thinking out loud, and have often been surprised by a proactive response to something as simple as a status update. Sometimes help comes when you didn’t even ask.

Any more, anyone?

1 day ago

Ron Donaldson • Hi Susan
I fully agree with the five areas Chris has identified and would like to add five more:

Diversity: – I now have connections with people with a huge diversity of interests and perspectives across for example storytelling, complexity and Nature. This results in much greater crossover of ideas and occasionally avoidance of mistakes already made in a different field.

Pheromone Trails: Pursuit of new knowledge is now unbelievably similar to ants foraging. Anyone can find something and blog or tweet it. This is then retweeted based on how useful that knowledge might be for others. Trending themes quickly emerge and highlight areas of common interest.

Chaining: – I love the way simple connections between social software tools allow a simple tweet to flow from Twitter, to Facebook, to Linked-In, to Plaxo and pick up comments from each of the quite different networks which end up back as emails. This means that people can use whichever tool suits them but still be connected and aware of something new.

Maturity: As the first tools in each of their niches mature they are being added as standard to mobile phones, widescreen TV’s and probably fridges and hoovers as we speak. This makes it much easier to maintain connections and thereby keep informed wherever you are which was never possible five years ago unless they phoned you.

Feedback: My favourite aspect of WordPress blogs is the dashboard site stats. This gives you a daly read-out of the terms individuals used to access your daily utterances, which pages they clicked and which links they took to others. Once you get over the depressingly low numbers of visitors it is great encouragement to attract greater interest so the feedback really does build a stronger ‘system’.

My only concern is that Social Media is still the domain of the early adopters. A lot of my ex-colleagues in nature conservation have so much vital and important knowledge, but they have absolutely no interest in social media. They really should be forced or at worst, paid lots of money for opening up their knowledge for the benefit of the planet.

[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Simon Carswell, John Davies. John Davies said: Excellent RT @SimonCarswell: How Knowledge sharing 2.0 is related to Brownian Motion, and ants: http://bit.ly/a8HZfT […]